Welcome to No Limit Sound Productions

Our mission is to provide excellent quality and service to our customers. We do customized service.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Why you will be beaten to success by people who are no better than you

You would have thought that being brilliant would make you a
front-runner, but it is the average masses who are in the lead, and you
are trailing badly. Why...?

By David Mellor, Course Director of Audio Masterclass

There is no doubt that it is difficult to succeed in music. Commonly people fail to succeed because they don't realize just how
difficult it is, so they don't try hard enough. But suppose you were
gifted with natural talent, and worked your socks off. Surely success
would be guaranteed?

Wouldn't it?

Well, I came across a
startling demonstration of how difficult it is to succeed just
yesterday at the annual Thame duck race. Yes, that's the annual duck
race, at Thame (the 'h' is silent) close to where I live. And yes, it
is relevant. Very relevant indeed.

What happens is that a local
charitable organization has bought several thousand identical plastic
ducks, of the kind you might have in your bath. Each duck is numbered
and the public is encouraged to 'buy' a duck to take part in the race.

On race day, the ducks are put in a dumper truck and dropped from a
bridge into the river simultaneously. The winner is the one that floats
to the finishing line first. There is even a podium for the first three
that finish (ducks, not owners).

Now, the relevance...

All of the ducks are exactly the same so each has an equal chance of
winning. Yet what happened in the race was that a few ducks immediately
took the lead. Then during the course of the race the front runners
got further and further ahead of the pack.

At the end of the race
there was a gap of nearly a minute between the first and second place,
then another minute from second to third. The pack was practically
nowhere, and many had been caught up on the banks or by low-hanging
tree branches.

Now, I would have expected a classical gaussian
distribution, where most of the ducks finish in round about an average
time, a few are spectacularly fast and some are spectacularly slow.

But those fast ducks... well, they could have taught Sebastian Vettel a
lesson or two. They were blindingly fast in comparison to the rest.

What this says for us is that if everyone who aspires to success in
music has equal ability and equal opportunity, a few will achieve
fantastic success just by chance, and the rest of us will remain way
behind, despite our equal ability and opportunity.

Now, suppose that you are brilliant, and you do work your socks off...

But chance has positioned you among the masses, and no matter how much
you hone your talent, and how hard you work, you still can't get
anywhere close to the front runners, whose talent and work rate is only
average. Chance has selected them as 'lucky ducks' and you as merely an
'average duck'.

So you might think that, being brilliant and
hard working, all you have to do is compete against people who are
average, and you will be certain to succeed. But no, you have to
compete with people who are average and have massive luck on their side.

So it's not just hard to be successful in music, you need at least a certain amount of luck to push you along.

Now here's a question, and it has to be asked...

Which of today's successful artists are nothing more than 'front-running ducks'?